[KS] A Question about pukkando

[Mark Peterson]

Greetings islanders and half-islanders,

All this chatter about bando brings another question to my mind, and 
that is the etymology of Pukkando -- the term for Manchuria.  It's is 
"north" "space" "island" -- and how did that come about?  There is 
nothing of an island in that northern space.

This is probably a simple question the answer to which many of you 
know, and maybe I just ought to go look it up; but I think it might 
contribute to this discussion on "half-islands".

best,
Mark

On May 9, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Andriy Ryzhkov wrote:

> Dear Christopher!
> First of all, it seems to me that it is not necessarily the Japanese 
> who among the other nations of the same cultural and historical Far 
> East area were first to derive the word [bando]. And not necessarily 
> it was a semantic borrowing from English - what if Japanese (or 
> Chinese, for example) didn`t borrow it from English or any other 
> languages at all? Do you have any evidence that it was a loan-word? 
> This question needs more etymological investigation.
> Well, if to speak about Korean and Japanese languages, it is widely 
> known that both of them have numerous words of Chinese origin. Thus, 
> the word-formation rules and models used to derive new words in 
> Sino-Korean or Sino-Japanese part of vocabulary of each of the 
> mentioned language would be the same, if not to take into 
> consideration several exceptions. And, of course, they will be 
> acceptable for Chinese language as well. For this reason, if a Chinese 
> character-based word is derived, say, in Japanese, it can be easily 
> recognized by Koreans or Chinese.
> In case it was derived by the Japanese, it is not Japan-centric 
> translation due to Japanese worldview, since it was derived using the 
> Sino-Japanese lexical material, which the Japanese came to use since 
> the adoptation of Chinese characters. Thus, the word should be 
> considered as a phenomenon of lexical re-export to Chinese, since in 
> China they also use the word 半岛.
> If to assume that the word "peninsula" was borrowed from English (but 
> it wasn`t necessarily so, I believe), then we should refer to its 
> etymology. English, in its turn, borrowed it from Latin 
> [pæninsula], lit. "almost an island" -  from [pæne] "almost" 
> + [insula] "island." Earlier it was translated as "demie island".
> If you need alternative ways of naming "peninsula", you should find an 
> synonimic variant for the word`s first formant ban- (since "-do", 
> meaning "island" can not be altered). If you want a pure Korean 
> variant, I see it as a hybrid-word "bansom" ("-som" meaning island in 
> native Korean), since I see no alternative for the "ban-".
> Sorry if my remarks didn`t shed any light on your question
> Andriy Ryzhkov
>
>
>
>
>